Xselli’s Oathbound Paladin Build Full-Buff/Tank Part 1 – Stats/Gear

Today I’m going to present a write-up of my Oathbound Paladin buff build for NWO:Uncensored! The German crowd might also refer to the build video on my YouTube channel. The main purpose of this build is to present a viable tank for all content with a heavy focus on buffing the party as well. Have fun reading through this!

Race and Ability Scores

First of all the Oathbound Buff Paladin works best with the Dragonborn race. Unfortunately it’s exclusively available to in the Dragonborn Legend ZEN Pack or by buying the race separately, without the bonus package items. Other viable races include Human (+defense, more feat points) and Drow (extra debuff).

Ability Scores: Grants you +2 to any two stats.

Dragonborn Fury: Your Power and Critical Strike are increased by 3%.

Draconic Heritage: You receive 5% more healing from all spells and abilities.

The main ability score you want to push is Constitution for HP, where you should start with a 17-18 roll to get to 30 at lvl 70. Your second priority should be Charisma and Wisdom where you should reach 22.

Gear

Your gear should prioritize: Power (about 40-50k should be base Power for the Power sharing), Recovery (about 20,000) and Defense (80%). Also don’t forget to bring your Armor Penetration to the current cap (85%). Your HP should definitely be above 200k better 300k . Generally HP is more important than Defense for a Protection OP. First of all, the class already features pretty strong mitigation self-buffs, which makes stacking Defense less important. And your paragon additionally buffs base power based on your HP when getting hit.

A full “bis” example of all gear is set up in our Ratings Calculator. You can go from there or just min/max for yourself. If you don’t have enough Armor Penetration from your pet you can use the Guild Boon.

Weapon Set

The guild set is “bis” as it provides a nice boost to the party. All other sets are viable in the following order: Relic -> Fey -> Chult.

Artifacts

There are two options as main Artifacts. The Sigil of the Devoted offers a nice AP boost for yourself while the Lantern of Revelation buffs the group’s damage. If you’re often running with the same premade, the Wheel of Elements becomes an option as well. But providing your DPS the fire buff needs coordination and most use it themselves.

Both are viable and one again I’d more look towards stats I need than getting a specific set.

Enhancements

Four Weapon Enhancements are viable. Holy Avenger offers best protection, but is probably not needed in an endgame group. For debuffs go with Frost and Plague Fire. Note that same ranks of Frost stacks while Plague Fire does not, so if possible you definitely want to pay attention to what other support toons in the group are using. If you absolutely don’t have access to one of the two (yet), you can also go with Terror.

You have three choices of Armor Enhancements. Shadowclad has some damage resistance utility. As mentioned above the OP features a heavy dose of self-buffs however. So make sure you’re not already capped. A better defensive option is Barkshield, which can soak up a nice amount of damage. You can also go with Negation, mainly because it buffs your Recovery.

Companions

Your choice of an active companion mainly depends on the gear you have available. The Con Artist is pretty standard. It’s easy to gear with ring slots and absolutely viable. Dancing Shield is a more defensive variant, but that one is frequently used by GFs and its debuff doesn’t stack. The Harper Bard is adds some healing, but can’t proc the Insignia Bonus “Protector’s Camaraderie” (see below).

You have a wide array of choices for the other active bonuses. Energon is standard for +HP, after that you can go with anything that debuffs enemy damage or adds healing. Since you’re not featuring too much Critical Strike, the Owlbear Cub is a nice, albeit expensive, way to boost personal DPS.

Whenever you use a Daily power, your teammates Defense, Deflection, and Movement are increased by 5% of your Power for 10 seconds.

As mentioned above, Protector’s Camaraderie is useless if you use the Harper Bard. Also only use Cavalry’s Warning if you have a legendary mount power. A good replacement in both cases is “Gladiator’s Guile”.

Speaking of the legendary mount. If you’re lucky enough to be able to pick one, it should be:

That’s it folks! Now that we’ve talked a little bit about gear and build philosophy, I’m going to show you the powers and feats next! In case you have any questions or remarks in the meantime, make sure to post them in the comments below and visit the corresponding thread on our message board!

Neverwinter UN:Blogged is always looking for writers to contribute to the blog. If you are an active player and search for a way to spread your opinions, analysis, diaries or reviews to more than 40,000 regular visitors, then don’t hesitate and get in touch with us on our contact page or message board! We are currently especially looking for console and PVP content, but that’s not exclusive. There is no frequency requirement, you post how often you want.

I wouldn’t recommend this build. In my opinion every build that doesn’t use Radiant on all character slots, shouldn’t call themselves “Full-Buff”. Also Recovery is not needed and not using 8000 power guild boon is not recommended either. You can easily get your Armor Penetration from your companion. If you go for a build like that, you should prioritize power share above everything else.

Valid stuff. Just one thing: Isn’t the source of ArPen secondary as long as you cap at 85% ? Also we’d like to pass on a question raised from putz on our message board. How viable are Augments for an OP since it transfers HP?

I would prefer to see a little more about how to play and what key feats are needed. This is basically a shopping list of stuff to buy, maybe there is a part 2 coming with some of this information. Fingers crosses.

“Just one thing: Isn’t the source of ArPen secondary as long as you cap at 85% ?” No cause the 8000 power from guild boon count towards power share. Everything you get from companion doesn’t, so you get your ArPen/Recovery/Crit (whatever you need/want) from there.

“How viable are Augments for an OP since it transfers HP?” If you go for a build that is purely based on buffing power an augmented companion (like Bulette Pup) could probably be viable (haven’t tested it tho). But then again you will sacrifice a lot of your own dps, since you will lose a lot of Power/Crit/ArPen by doing so.

You’re right. ArPen should come from your pet. It’s just meant for the small players, if they can’t get it from pet they can use the Guild boon for that.

Augments are NOT useful for op cause your HP don’t increase the dmg of the group. Only their own HP makes a difference. And the Power you get by an augmented companion don’t the increase the power you share to other people. Furthermore you need the recovery of your pet to buff your group the ideal way. (cooldown reduction for group)

(1) For an OP, Charisma outperforms Wisdom pretty dramatically on end-game performance. (2) The build over-emphasizes Recovery, which you just don’t need with a Justice build as your rotation should be including Divine Call use (it should never be full once combat starts), which triggers the Justice tree capstone. (3) As Draco pointed out, Radiants should fill every slot on the character-worn gear if this is for full power-share build. (4) An OP Race list that includes Drow, but omits Tiefling is missing something. (5) The artifact set list should include the ‘Demon Lords’ Immortality’ (the Orcus gear) set as the BIS DPS set, with possibly a mentioning of the Black Ice set as a cheaper alternative. (6) A weapon enchant list that omits Feytouched and Vorpal for an OP demonstrates a lack of understanding of class mechanics. (7) A companion list that omits Air Archon, Earth Archon (with Templar’s Wrath, you should almost always be at max HP), and Siege Master is similarly missing out on a lot of potential and threat generation. Harper Bard is also not a realistic companion to place on the list as it is very rare and expensive to acquire for little benefit (you could convert any number of pets to legendary for the cost to acquire). I would also warn people away from the Owlbear Cub (I have a legendary one that is now in my inactive companion pool) given it’s broken mechanics and upcoming nerfs (ask any SW who had or uses one). (8) The mount list excludes the 2 +4K Power mounts, which are the best for Power-sharing, though the ones listed are worthwhile.

I tested a Legendary Bulette Pup (only Augment with 3 Defense Slots to maximize Empower HP) on the Test Server with 3xRank 14 Empowered vs. my Legendary Sellsword with 3xRank 14 Bonding and found more Power (DPS) was generated by the Bondings, though that isn’t base Power. Bonding Runestones generated higher Temp HP totals using Templar’s Wrath. The bonus HP from Empowered may have resulted in a higher Power-share totals as the HP increase does impact base Power through damage taken, but I wasn’t testing for that. As Draco pointed out, you would be sacrificing personal DPS for that trade-off. You are also trading off the Sellsword/Con Artist/Rebel Mercenary defense debuff that improves group DPS (though not to the extent it did prior to the debuff change).

1. I used to run Valhalla set, it’s not optimal for OP unless you PVP because you WANT to take damage is the short version to generate more power.

2. BIS is Orcus set. Black ice set doesn’t work properly. Protectors set is a cheap newbie alternative. The rest is garbage for us.

3. To properly play an Op Tank think of yourself as a glass cannon dps with the ability to generate a ton of aggro and hp to protect yourself and others and go from there. GF is what you think of in a traditional MMO as a tank; stop trying to gear and play like them. We have to dish out damage to maintain aggro (So we get 500%bonus to that). Get a debuff companion as a main such as con artist/sellsword/rebel mercenary. Then go with earth and air archon. Then add a siege master. That leaves the last one up to you. It can be a fire archon for more dps, energon for more up, crit severity companion, or a velociraptor.

4. Vorpal or fey works best for us. Armor…meh whatever I like negation for extra recovery bit soulforged has its uses as well.

Defence really? No. This build is wrong. Rads in every defence and offence on the toon and our defence comes (if we even need it) from gift of faith and circle of power. 16k pally here that can solo fbi

do you share you build perhaps somewhere .. i am only 13k OP and are looking for ideas on what to do next. I can tank all dungeons incl TONG. So don’t want to go the wrong route. Or can you recommend a build to look at

It is the best online guide available for OPs and what I would have written if I had taken the time to post my build, though I came to the same conclusions with my own testing even before the guide was posted. It also walks you through the mechanics (good for new OPs) and gearing up options as well if you aren’t already in a full primal set.

One of my posts on this thread discusses some testing I did with the bulette pup from the test server before 12b went live. You trade off a significant amount of DPS (whatever would be multiplied from your active companion through bonding – normally Armor Pen, Power, and Crit) for a 60K HP boost (assuming rank 14 Empowered Runestones). The marginal benefit that 60K HP is about 6K base power once you take damage to trigger the OP class feature, which is nice, but not a trade-off I want to make given the benefits Bonding Runestones on my active companion provides (i.e., I don’t have to slot Armor Pen somewhere else to maintain threat). It may be more worthwhile if your companion gear is weak or if you don’t have high-end Bondings to slot.

Actually SH weapon buffs everyone on the party. Tooltip of SH weapon is misleading. Power gained via Protector’s camaradrie and friendship are not shared by aura of gift. Good for solo dps, not so much for party.

Privacy & Cookies: We use cookies to personalize content and ads, to provide social media features, and to analyze our traffic. We also share information about your use of our site with our social media, advertising and analytics partners. You can close this dialogue if you're cool with that, or visit our privacy and cookie page for more details. Privacy and Cookie Consent Information

Neverwinter game content and materials are trademarks and copyrights of Cryptic Studios, Inc. or its licensees. All rights reserved. Dungeons & Dragons logos and materials are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast LLC. All rights reserved. Neverwinter Unblogged is completely unofficial and is not affiliated with, endorsed, sponsored, or specifically approved by Cryptic Studios or Wizards of the Coast LLC.